Category: tv

Via MediaBistro’s mailing list, I heard about this article on Boston.com about fX’s new reality show “Masterplan”. Basically, a guy is filmed 24 hours a day and the viewers get to vote on his life decisions:

Imported from Portugal, where it is known as &l.dquo;Masterplan,” the series will follow an individual — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — who has agreed to turn over his life decisions to the viewers, who vote via phone and the Internet after each episode. FX will begin running seven one-hour episodes in its “Friday Night Fix” programming in October. […]

It reminds me in some ways of an IRL version of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. And I suppose I’m most curious about what type of decisions the viewers would get to vote on. In any case, it seems interesting.

Zip2it reports that Temptation Island is coming back to Fox on Thursday, August 28th:

As with the previous two editions of the show, four couples who’ve been dating for a while will spend two weeks on a tropical island — in this case, the Caribbean’s Bay Islands. They’ll spend most of the apart from each other and in the company of 14 members of the opposite sex whose goal is to, as the title suggests, tempt them. […]

There’s a degree of schadenfreude in any reality tv show, but perhaps none more in what I like to call Schadenfreude Island. Really, I don’t know why couples agree to go on the show — I can imagine nothing good for their relationship that could come from participating. But, at at least it gives a good laugh for the rest of us :).

Christopher Blizzard, of Mozilla fame, has an unhappy TiVo. Stated simply: “A Severe Error Has Occured&rdquo. It continues:

Please leave the receiver plugged in and connected to the phone line for the next three hours while the Receiver attempts to repair itself. […]

Yikes. That must be the TiVo-equivalent of the unhappy-Mac.

From Media Bistro’s mailing list, I saw this article on AdAge.com about the decline of reality programming that also happens to include the schedule for the 2003-2004 television season.

The article itself doesn’t have much new insight (“reality tv on the decline”, and so on) but I was interested with the television schedule as it includes the projected television-share for each show as well. And after giving the schedule a closer look, I see that — once again — That ’70s Show conflicts with Enterprise on Wednesdays.

I only have a single-tuner TiVo, so I can’t record both. And, I’m usually still at the gym when they air, so I’m not able to watch-one-and-record-the-other either. So, I guess that's one more season that I won’t be able to watch That ’70s Show :(.

TiVo software 4.0 includes support for wireless USB network adapters. The software rollout began on April 6th, though my machine only got the update a couple weeks ago. Since I have little use for a land line (other than for TiVo nighly updates), I decided to try wireless networking. The Linksys WUSB11 is officially supported, so I went with that. Sure, there’re reports of D-Link and other brands working as well, but they were all about the same price anyway.

So, the adapter arrived from Newegg yesterday and the install couldn’t be easier. There’re no drivers to install or configure, and the little guy gets his power from the USB port. So, I just had to plug it in :).

TiVo automatically recognized the device and I just had to confirm some settings (“obtain an IP address automatically&rdquo, and so on). Just to be sure, I selected the “Test Connection” option, and everything went fine. Haha, one less reason for a land line! (err, “one fewer”?)

I’m now tempted to sign up for the TiVo Home Media option ($99). It includes JPEG viewing and MP3 playing, but the big feature for me would be remote-scheduling. That way, if I heard about a cool show at work, I could schedule it right away. The only downside to remote-scheduling (according to what I’ve read on the TiVo Community forums) is that it doesn’t alert the user if there’s a conflict. Hmm, maybe it's not so useful after all.